An anthropological theory of dispossession

Thesis

There is a vast body of literature exploring human remains and the body in museums, which primarily considers the political role of human remains and their connection to historical racial sciences. While these fields of literature are important, this dissertation instead holds up similar questions about human remains but against a different body of literature. Instead, this work considers how anthropological academic theory impacts museological practices and contributes to both tangible and intangible forms of dispossession.

To answer this research question, this work explores three case studies which each centre around a return made from the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) in Oxford. In each case, I look at the story of the return and consider what has been taken away, diminished, negated, or made to disappear. The focus here is on what is subtracted – information removed as a tangible manifestation of intangible dispossession. By examining occlusions in archival records, this dissertation creates a typology of redactions to further our understanding of how museological archives exclude information that can humanise the remains in collections while distancing institutions and collectors from extractive violence. This typology of redactions leads to the conclusion that re/humanisation through counter-forensics is impossible because of the fragmented nature of museum archives and considers how this affects our ability to use tactics such as removal from display in order to address unprovenanced human remains in collections, which form the majority of museological collections.

Finally, this work suggests that if the archive is broken, then so too is the anthropological voice, concluding that new creative and literary methodologies are needed to confront dispossession and human remains in museological collections. Ultimately, this suggested focus on storytelling is not a departure from anthropological tradition, as the four fields approach sees the discipline of anthropology as a compilation of archaeology, physical anthropology, cultural anthropology and linguistics. At the crux of this lies linguistics. In this sense, this dissertation suggests a revisiting creative forms of writing history and a reorientation of anthropological theory. Rather than a disciplinary rejection, this work suggests a pyro-epistemological controlled burn of the field which looks back to early anthropological literature on gift-giving and material exchange from Malinowski and Mauss in order to highlight the implications of Mauss’ obligations of reciprocity and debt in material exchange, which are ideas that lie at the heart of cultural restitution.

Authors: Rose, SS

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-jbab9xvby
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: archaeology; cultural heritage; anthropology; human remains; archives; museums; gifts
• Subjects: Archaeology; Anthropology; Museum objects